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Weekend Wrapup: 10/Apr - 17/Apr

posted on 2011-04-17 11:59 EDT

Madman and Siren Visual bringing more anime online for Australia and New Zealand, another big-name video game RPG gets an anime and a new approach taken to scanned manga in Japan as an era ends in North America

Madman Entertainment will simulcast the new series Blue Exorcist for free on its Madman Screening Room site. Blue Exorcist, directed by Tensai Okamura (Memories (movie), Wolf's Rain, Darker than Black), is based on a manga about a half-human son of Satan becoming an exorcist to stop his father from using his body to enter the human world. The simulcast will begin on April 20th and episodes will be screened shortly after the Japanese broadcast. Madman also announced that it has acquired the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood movie Fullmetal Alchemist: the Sacred Stars of Milos, with plans to release it theatrically as well as other titles including the two Battle Royale live-action films, the live-action Gantz films, Digimon Adventure (TV) and K-ON!.

Tokyopop has announced that its North American publishing operations will cease on May 31st. Tokyopop was founded in 1997 under the name Mixx and contributed to America's manga boom in the last decade with high-profile titles such as Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Fruits Basket, Love Hina and GTO. The company popularised publishing translated manga in 'unflopped' format reading right to left, as printed in Japan, and promoted Korean comics (manwha) and original English language (OEL) manga. The company has experienced trouble in recent years, with Japanese publisher Kodansha annulling its Tokyopop licenses in 2009 and the bankruptcy of bookstore chain Borders leading to staff lay-offs. Tokyopop will continue to run European publishing and film operations from its office in Germany.

Japanese manga distribution website J-Comi, founded by Ken Akamatsu (Love Hina, Negima! Magister Negi Magi), has begun a new initiative to release illegally-scanned manga free with advertising. Called the "Illegal (Out-of-Print) Manga File Purification Project" by Akamatsu, people may anonymously submit scans of out-of-print manga to J-Comi, which then contacts the manga creators for approval. If the creators give permission, the scans are released on J-Comi with added advertisments, the revenue of which goes to the creators. The first title to be "purified" is a one-volume manga from 1993, Player wa Nemurenai: The Man Lost in the Network Labyrinth. Miracle Hime Jubilee by Gaku Miyao (Devil Hunter Yohko) was the second title but has been taken down temporarily.

The Atlus role-playing video game Persona 4 will be adapted to a television anime series by AIC ASTA, with direction from Seiji Kishi (Angel Beats!, My Bride is a Mermaid). Several staff from the original game development team are working on the anime, including concept and character designers Kazuma Kaneko and Shigenori Soejima, music composer Shoji Meguro, and the voice acting cast (including Daisuke Namikawa, Showtaro Morikubo, Yui Horie and AMi Koshimizu). The announcement was made, after a teaser campaign including television advertising and a countdown website, on www.mayonaka-tv.jp on April 11th; April 11th, 2011, is the in-game date the Persona 4 protagonist arrives in the town in which the game takes place.

Finally, Siren Visual has revealed C (for Control) will be its second anime streamed on Anime News Network Video, following Tiger & Bunny. C (for Control) is a Noitamina title directed by Kenji Nakamura (Mononoke (TV), Kūchū Buranko) about a scholarship student in an economically-devastated Japan who is offered an executive job at a bank in a mysterious parallel universe. Simulcasting will begin on April 22nd.

Travel back in time (and maybe have your gender swapped) to seven different periods of Japanese history, all from the comfort of your couch.― The history of Japanese civilization is expansive, predating the Common Era by 10,000 years (the Jomon period). There's much more ground to cover compared to what kids get in U.S. history classes in high school, which rarely cover anything before the Boston T...

Junji Ito's death-stench horror gets the deluxe treatment with a new hardcover omnibus, but the subject matter might not work for everyone.― Junji Ito is inarguably one of the masters of horror manga, utilizing both horror (physical revulsion) and terror (psychological reaction) to create gut-churning tales of the world gone mad. To a degree, he carries this out in his two-volume series Gyo from 200...

Voice actor/director/professional Dungeons & Dragons player Liam O'Brien returns to the podcast after a 5-year hiatus to discuss his roles in Fate/Zero and Sailor Moon, along with the landscape for anime voice acting now and what it's like to be Gollum.― ANNCast Episode 234: Podcastoes O'Brien Get the Flash Player to see this player. Voice actor/director/professional Dungeons & Dragons player Liam ...

If you went to an anime convention this summer or have used the internet lately, you may notice anime fans seem to have fallen in love with Steven Universe. Why? Because the show loves them right back.― If you've been to an anime convention in the past year, you've probably seen colorful, gem-studded cosplay like this filling the hallways. Photo credit links: top left, top right, bottom left, bottom...

If you've got questions for the director of the high-flying fantasy series The Pilot's Love Song, we've potentially got answers for you!― We've been given the opportunity to interview The Pilot's Love Song director Toshimasa Suzuki, and we need your help! NISA, who will be releasing the fantasy action drama The Pilot's Love Song on bluray September 22nd, asked for fan questions for Mr. Suzuki, whos...

Bee-Train's 2001 girls-with-guns classic returns on Blu-Ray, and holds up surprisingly well, despite some mediocre animation.― Not all older series deserve the Blu-Ray treatment. For some it is because the show just isn't as iconic as people might like to think, while for others it's because the quality was never BD worthy in the first place. Noir, fortunately, does hold up well enough that its tran...

Egypt Arc is JoJo in peak condition, as memorable and engaging an adventure as you could hope for. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is back.― When we last left our heroes, they'd just arrived on the shores of Egypt, escaping the literal jaws of defeat in order to finally save Jotaro's mother. The journey there had been a lengthy and sometimes inconsistent one, with their various adventures indeed being plen...

The creator of the hit manga, recently adapted into a popular anime series, talks about her inspirations, how she got her start, and what it's like to watch your manga become a TV show.― As you might guess from the story, the main character of the story is a high school roughneck named Ryu Yamada. Yamada meets cute, quiet, and studious Urara Shiraishi, who is his complete opposite in almost every wa...